This book is the first to link the modern appreciation for democratic freedom directly to Jewish political thought in seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

Gregory B. Kaplan is Professor of Spanish and an Affiliated Faculty Member of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, USA.

Introduction: From Democracy to Democratic Zionism 1 Flawed Democracy, the Aristotelian Agricultural Democracy, and the Hebrew Republic 2 The Medieval Divine-Right Monarchy, an Anti-Hebrew Republic 3 The Divine-Right Spanish Monarchy and the Conversos 4 The Hebrew Republic as an Alternative to Habsburg Rule and the Emergence of Morteira, Barrios and Spinoza 5 The Hebrew Republic and Democratic Zionism in the Writings of Morteira 6 Morteira, Hobbes and the Democratic Zionism of Spinoza and Barrios 7 Democratic Zionism and Twenty-First Century Zionism; Appendix: Treatise on the Truth of the Law of Moses, Chapters One, Two, Ten and Eleven (Translation into English by Gregory B. Kaplan)